Thursday, July 30, 2009

When I wrote about Bing a few weeks ago, people backlashed at me like I criticized their first-born. Google has (rightfully) enjoyed dominance for several years now, and will certainly feel the heat from Bing. This is great for end-users.

Microsoft has now partnered with Yahoo (after unsuccessfully trying to acquire it) and this will surely make the challenge with Google more interesting. Bing is now receiving favorable reviews from various circles and has also slowly increased its share. With Google challenging Microsoft in the operating system and Office software fields, the battle will only benefit the users again. That is what I am most gleeful about.

Bing has clearly seen the search engine from the perspective of the ‘regular’ person and has organized the page accordingly. The thing about the ‘regular’ person is that more and more people use the search engine for almost everything, hence blurring the lines.Some of the other useful features that Bing has highlighted (see/click images for details):* Images can be quickly displayed in various formats (small, medium, large, with information) and pop out when hovered. More images are displayed if you wait.

* Videos will start playing when hovered, thus saving you time. (This could actually be a bit annoying since you can accidentally play a video when just moving around the page. Just hover out!)

*Popularity index of the searched term is displayed in a time-line graph. This also shows the top-ranked searches in the same ‘category’ helping you find the most popular item in the searched ‘category’.

It will now be interesting to see if Google ups the ante and provides newer features. Google currently has over 70-80% (numbers vary) of the search engine market, but time will tell if Bing will make a ding in this share.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The last three weeks of my work-life were fully dedicated to a program called Regents’ Chinese Academy. One of the main facets of this program was a three-site videoconference that collaborated Ohio State University, Miami University (Hamilton), and Washington State Community College.

Video Conference (VC) technology is getting better and IP based VC is improving since most sites follow the H.323 standard and have similar equipment. But the fact that there are still different types of audio and video equipment, varying broadband, echo cancellation devices, etc makes things a lot trickier. And in our case, the fact that more than 2 sites were involved over a bridge, made things a lot more complicated.

I have stressed before of the need to test and maintain protocols on VCs. But in the case of important VCs, it may also be important to personally know the staff that drive these systems. Since this was a 3-week program, I had the chance to go and meet the tech people from the other 2 universities. At first I thought that this was unnecessary, but in hindsight that was one of the most important factors that helped to make this event work. Knowing the staff at the 2 sites personally, and how they interact with technology and people was directly responsible for increase in the response rate during tech issues. Knowing who to contact and what type of response – speed, method, language – was expected helped tremendously in a situation where the technology was complicated and needed a lot of attention.

Moral of the story: Though VC technology has taken over some of the person to person contact, knowing your business partners personally alleviates some of the headaches that technology itself brings.